That's very strange. Divine Spirit costing more than Prayer of Spirit? Other mana classes have been mucked up a bit by this change too. Mage Arcane Blast is costing over 1000 mana apparently, almost twice the cost of a Fireball.
It's inevitable that some spells will have silly costs now, people on beta need to report them as bugged and get them fixed.
I have a strong suspicion that blizzard hasn't really thought through all the PvE implications of this change. If they don't change models of incomming boss dps we are going to see a LOT of dead tanks because of damage spikes while healers are waiting for enough damage to justify dropping a heal bomb. Either that or we all spam our 1.5 second cast spell mindlessly as we did way back when starting MC and GH had a retarded 4 second cast time. even with all the changes we can't spam max rank GH as we will go oom very fast. It looks like a fully talented GH will be about 900 mana and even with a 15k mana pool you will be oom in less than a minute. This is encouraging cast cancelling which is painful if you suffer from high ping or reactive healing with all the dangers of tank death this entails.
*edit*
The buffing of PWS continues
Power Word: Shield Rank 13: 815 -> 745 Mana
which helps disc priests but serendipity >> rapture under this change
There has been a trend of dumbing down healing all over WotLK and the downranking change continues this trend. As already mentioned, this vastly limits my number of available choices of spells.
Previously we've seen the trend towards "smart heals" (the game figures out automatically who needs healing and selects the target for you, or simply passivley heals someone when condition A is met) started already in BC but continuing, as well as talents that compensate for overhealing. Now this.
What I would like now, is for Blizzard to give us some options back. Kick some life back into Lesser Heal and Heal! They could turn those spells into replacements, properly balanced for mana efficiency if that is what Blizz is worried about, and to fill the gaps in priest healing that the downranking nerf creates. Making GH9 and FH11 the only single target options we have is just... dumbing down the game.
Also, while 25-man raiding won't be affected so much becuase Holy is not intended for MT healing, it will mean a potential problem in 5-mans and even 10-mans where you as a Holy priest will have to be MT healing, and just stopcasting max rank GH does not seem a very attractive scenario.
Actually with the current serendipity Holy is the all comers king of mindless spamming on the tank and cancel casting be damned. No 5 man is hard to heal, heroics maybe, but not 5 mans even in shitty gear. One thing that is blatantly obvious is that all classes will need an intermediate sized heal for when the Flash heal etc are not enough and top rank greater heal is way to much.
We need an efficient mid-rank heal. Flash Heal is ok, and it heals for about what you'd want for a spammy spell (4.5-5.0k), but it's horribly inefficient. Bring back Heal, and put in a lot of new ranks.
Shamans get LHW and HW up to level 70 ... why can't we have Heal and GH?
As an aside, you can easily expect to be pushing 2000 spellpower in a 25-man raid. I'm breaking 1700 with food/elixir/self-buffs at the moment, and BoK + glyph'd Improved BoM will push it quite a bit higher, not even factoring in WoA / Flametongue / whatever totems get dropped to increase spellpower even more. So every equation you crunk, just plug in 2000 spellpower; it'll be (+/- 100) accurate-ish.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein
This is an excellent. Make sure you post a suggestions thread on the beta forums. What do you think, should its cast time be 2.5 base (2 with talents)? I would love to see that.
Shamans get LHW and HW up to level 70 ... why can't we have Heal and GH?
The way I remember from playing my Shaman way back, LHW is essentially the Shaman's version of Flash Heal. Currently according to Wowhead values (which may or may not have changed this patch), it's less potent and more expensive, thus also less efficient. With a quick browse through the talents, it's also not quite as affected by talents, so probably scales worse.
That said, I fully agree with the Lesser Heal/Heal/GHeal potential, to give some other options at heal size selection. I seriously doubt Blizzard has considered the effect on healing sufficiently, looks like they might have more aimed it at the use of rank 1 spells in PVP to gain utility. I feel anything might be better than feeling forced to drop massively overhealing GHeals because thanks to Serendipity they are the most efficient way of dealing with the situation...
The way I remember from playing my Shaman way back, LHW is essentially the Shaman's version of Flash Heal. Currently according to Wowhead values (which may or may not have changed this patch), it's less potent and more expensive, thus also less efficient. With a quick browse through the talents, it's also not quite as affected by talents, so probably scales worse.
They are, while "Lesser Healing Wave" sounds like it should correspond to Heal/Lesser Heal it is really just the Shaman version of Flash Heal. Blizzard never split up Healing Wave into different spell names for Shamans like they did Priests (and I've never really been sure why they did that anyway). Shamans have no mana efficient small or midsized (single target) heal either. DPS can always wand something when they only need to do a trivial amount of damage but what do we (as healers generally) do now that we can't choose our heal sizes?
This downranking change has really annoyed me. Healing is not dps, our job is not always to take something from 1% to 100% as quickly as possible. I'm perfectly fine with them wanting to find a way to stop people from mindlessly spamming rank 1 spells when they are well geared but I don't think this was the best solution. When I started downranking it was before +healing even entered the picture (yeah, that was a while ago) and it really felt like a whole new mini game to me and was a bit part of the fun of healing.
Whats really horrible about this change is that I think it is going to hurt the most while leveling/gearing up or attempting to heal with an offspec. They seem very concerned that Fury Warriors (or other dps specs on tank classes) should be able to tank 5 mans but they don't seem to have given much thought to how healers should be able to handle content without some of the key mana saving/returning talents that help balance things. Honestly I don't see at all what balances it for Shamans (without Serendipity). I'm having a hard time imagining not going back to my Priest for healing in WotLK at this rate.
Just came back from reading the WoW official forums for a bit, which seem to be filled with idiots (mostly either non-healers, players who have never made it past Karazhan, and characters in PvP gear, or a combination thereof) who with downranking still seem to think back about the days of the Heal 2 spamming. I don't mind that that was taken out, being virtually unable to run OoM was amusing for some time, but I much prefer the choice we get today. According to this general WoW population logic, having lesser options available equals more skill, and whatever. I just don't quite get how Blizzard views downranking in healing, and what target this nerf is aimed at. From my PoV, the vast majority of efficiency gains from downranking was removed in 2.0; I'm pretty sure GHeal 1 is slightly more efficient but the main reason I use it is to fit my heals in the health deficit. In case of larger deficits, I'd similarly say the only reason to chain cast a smaller heal would be if you are doing anticipatory healing with a number of people and need to have the right endurance to not go OoM while still delivering the needed HPS, the big heals ending up to big for this purpose. If you are healing deficits by means of reactive healing, using a bigger heal is tyically better since you close that gap faster and get more OO5SR time anyways. Overall I don't see a problem with downranking the way it is now, as the insane scaling is gone; should Blizzard want to take the efficiency advantage completely away, they could always tweak mana costs and coefficients a little to assure this. Looks to me like it's to prevent the rank 1 utility application and junk buff usage, without ever considering the consequences for healers. It nearly makes me wonder if Blizzard considered the different nature of healing and damage; you don't have 'over-dps' aside from a spell which hits a boss after he dies, which nobody cares about anyways. Doing something about these low rank utility things is something I can see as being a concern (though rogues, the class most benefiting from this, aren't exactly doormats in PvP to say the least), but I wonder if they realized that for Healers there is a very valid reason to cast smaller heals.
Game balance wise I'm not even overly worried as a Priest (I can see Paladins and Shamans getting problems, for instance with the Light's Grace buff and the Shaman's total lack of an efficient, small-to-medium single target heal), as we got plenty of talents to deal with it better than any other class really. What annoys me however is that we get forced into what essentially 99% of the player base would currently consider 'bad' or 'wasteful' healing, while taking away most of our options, and nearly stimulating us to overheal. It takes away lots of choice, fun and skill from healing.
Just a bit of a maths thing which just struck me: while people have suggested using Flash Heal to then do the smaller deficits (being smaller and cheaper), Serendipity actually invalidates this. According to Constantius' list, GHeal costs 32% of base mana, Flash Heal 18%, Renew 17%. Let's assume they are all capable of closing the fairly small deficit (let's say 2-3k), while max rank GHeal hits for more than double the required value. Additionally, any priest with a remote idea about healing specs Improved Healing, which knocks GHeal down to 27.2% of base mana. When then choosing the heals, the effective cost of Greater Heal ends up being 0.4*27.2 = 10.88% of base mana to drop an 8k or so healbomb on that small deficit. (Depending on whether or not Serendipity refunds % of original or talented mana cost, this could even become only 8% of base mana) The loss in effective efficiency in these situations isn't particularly big (add in 16% clearcasting for more fun), but it does feel horribly counter intuitive. Flash Heal would end up being much more expensive so remains an emergency heal, unable to fill the gap, whereas Renew will be useful if you know that the target is going to take moderate damage in the near future or can't spend more than 1.5 seconds. Depending on the numbers, there could be a 'singularity' area where Flash Heal/Renew end up being better because the effective healing of GHeal is just above 50% and Serendipity does not apply (Flash Heal/Renew still do job), which is also going to be extremely counter intuitive, where you use GHeal for the big and small deficits and other spells for the deficits in between.
One thing I'd could see as replacement for the current situation which would solve any efficiency issues and such, but will likely never get implemented, would be allow us to cast a spell at a percentage of its power. For instance the single (max) rank we'd have would have a mana cost of X and a power Y, based on talents, gear and everything. With these computations done, players could then choose to cast the spell at a certain fraction of its full power (maybe fixed percentage intervals available). If a player would for instance cast a 60% GHeal, he would pay 60% of X in mana, and get 60% of Y in output, retaining the same efficiency but giving it a magnitude which fits the situation. If it's mainly the utility and side effects of spells Blizzard worries about, they could easily modify these to have 60% of succes, 60% of duration, 60% of magnitude and so forth, depending on the situation. Probably will never happen and might have some pitfalls, but it would solve all the healer-specific problems. (I realize Earth Shock interruption would still suck for Resto Shamans)
One thing writing this post and doing a couple of calculations has made me realized is that we are headed for a very weird situation with single target direct healing overall, due to Serendipity and all the downranking changes. Even if the downranking were to be put in again, there might be situations where Serendipity means that casting a big rank Greater Heal is going to be best (with downranking available, potentially the one with a magnitude barely capable of activating Serendipity) depending on scaling and penalties, and where with one rank there might be a special range of healing magnitudes where other spells are better, sandwiched by 2 ranges for which GHeal (max rank) is most efficient... If they put GHeal back in, I might need to make a spreadsheet with the magnitude, mana cost and efficiency for spells both in regular situations and when they 'proc' Serendipity, and end up with some sort of collection of ranges of health deficit for which what rank is best...(And consider the chance of others healing that target, which is likely to increase the overheal and makes Serendipity more likely to proc...)
One thing I'd could see as replacement for the current situation which would solve any efficiency issues and such, but will likely never get implemented, would be allow us to cast a spell at a percentage of its power. For instance the single (max) rank we'd have would have a mana cost of X and a power Y, based on talents, gear and everything.
I could see them doing this through the macro system.
(Depending on whether or not Serendipity refunds % of original or talented mana cost, this could even become only 8% of base mana)
As originally implemented (it's semi-broken again), Serendipity returns the mana cost of the untalented spell. So efficiency talents have multiple benefits with use.
But I completely agree with both of you: they've turned us into spam-bots that will use basically 3 spells: GH:9, Renew:14, and PoM:3. Why would I ever use anything else when if I overheal, I get back the mana cost? GH:9 is less mana than FH:11 if I overheal. WTF kind of sense is that?
I'm absolutely 100% fine with them removing Rank 1 and 2 spells from the game. I'm even semi-ok with them removing the +heal benefit from Ranks 1-5 (as they did with the initial downranking coefficient change/nerf). At least there I could use a lower-mana-cost spell (with less heal benefit) in order to heal for less.
Now, I don't have that option. And I really don't know how things are going to work. How do I top up someone? My only option is to overheal for 5k or more (to get Serendipity active) or to use Flash Heal. And as any serious raider knows, spamming Flash Heal is a good way to go oom ridiculously fast.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein
According to this general WoW population logic, having lesser options available equals more skill, and whatever.
I would like to defend that statement. I have always healed with max rank so far and have tailored my play style around that and there are a lot of nuances you can pick up and adjustments you can do to make it work. Being able to perfectly time a heal with incoming damage becomes much more important, being able to pick the right tool and the right moment to use it is further emphasized even if you have less tools available because you don't have crutches like GH:3 to fall back on to stretch your mana pool so much. If the average cost of spells is higher then each spell you cast matters more, being able to use cheap spells means you can waste some/most of them and not be punished for it.
We simply don't have enough information on healing scaling .......
In order to get that 25% crit......
Also, keep in mind that the single spell boosted by Discipline - PW:S - doesn't benefit from spell critical at all. Given this, it seems that the only reason a Discipline Priest would ever equip spell critical gear is if they're having mana issues - and, even then, it's a questionable tactic since it lowers the overall efficiency of their healing so much.
You have to presume some pretty unusual.....
Unless they dramatically scale the current scaling PWS with borrowed time will have roughly the same scaling as empowered healing+flash heal. According to what someone above posted this is certainly the case. Also the wording on the talent says that its an additional 20% of your healing. That means 20% of your healing power not 20% of what the spell currently benefits from. Does anyone have any numbers to determine whether this is true?
Discipline gets 15% more intellect and 5/5 divine fury we also get raidwide totems. I dont think the loss in spell power for 25% crit will be anywhere near 500 spell power. With the new changes to aegis disc will partially itemize for crit. If divine aegis works on total heal and not effective heal, then disc priests will stack crit.
No usuall circumstances, just the normal fight. You have obviously not healed much as disc. None of the circumstances you are describing is necessary for disc to shine. The only requirement is that raid damage is focused on individuals and not area of effect. When there is individual strong damage disc priests are going to be fairly close to holy priests, though not quite as good.
I would like to defend that statement. I have always healed with max rank so far and have tailored my play style around that and there are a lot of nuances you can pick up and adjustments you can do to make it work. Being able to perfectly time a heal with incoming damage becomes much more important, being able to pick the right tool and the right moment to use it is further emphasized even if you have less tools available because you don't have crutches like GH:3 to fall back on to stretch your mana pool so much. If the average cost of spells is higher then each spell you cast matters more, being able to use cheap spells means you can waste some/most of them and not be punished for it.
There are plenty of situations where well timed heals do not work at all. Any damage done to random raid members for example, or bosses that hit just extremely hard. On Brutallus trying to do well timed heals does more harm than good, while spamhealing with a slightly downranked Gheal and using max rank during stomps is the best solution
So, with the downranking nerf and serendipity, we can expect holy as well to gear for crit. And regen : going blindly for +Heal was good as long as you could downrank. With the new smart-aoe-heal system, I see this itemization working for aoe as well.
One thing that struck me is the new lightwell : drop it near the tank and he can monitor himself a second hot from you for one minute (what, he's too busy to click ? damn.)
Unless they dramatically scale the current scaling PWS with borrowed time will have roughly the same scaling as empowered healing+flash heal.
Currently, PW:S has a 30% base coefficient vs. Flash Heal's 43%. If they normalize the PW:S scaling, the two coefficients will be roughly equal if you ignore all WotLK Holy talents. But since we don't have accurate figures for this right now, it's tough to say.
However, it's almost certain that PW:S won't scale at nearly the rate Greater Heal does, or either heal once WotLK Holy talents are incorporated.
For a Discipline Priest, interweaving PW:S makes sense. But that doesn't make Discipline Priests worthwhile healers in comparison to other healers.
Discipline gets 15% more intellect and 5/5 divine fury we also get raidwide totems. I dont think the loss in spell power for 25% crit will be anywhere near 500 spell power. With the new changes to aegis disc will partially itemize for crit. If divine aegis works on total heal and not effective heal, then disc priests will stack crit.
@80, 1% spell crit is about 29 spell critical rating. 1 spell critical rating has an itemization budget equivalent to 1.16 spellpower. So +15% spell critical from gear is equivalent to +505 spellpower.
No usuall circumstances, just the normal fight. You have obviously not healed much as disc. None of the circumstances you are describing is necessary for disc to shine.
Alright. You've got a spec where you have one spell - PW:S - that is better than Holy. Every other healing spell you can possibly cast varies from slightly worse to enormously worse. Your argument is that somehow a spell you can only use 25% of the time, and only repeat on the same target every 15s overwhelms the value of every other healing spell Priests receive?
The down-ranking change also affects PvP quite a lot for a Priest. I will no longer use Holy Nova to flush out stealthers, or kill snakes. I will no longer be able to spam rank 1 Fortitude, Inner Fire and Fade for "dispel protection". On the other hand Shamans can't rank 1 Earth Shock me anymore I suppose.
It will also affect the way I can boost low level players. If I can't adjust my healing to the appropriate level then I'll waste lots of mana. Even worse, if I can't adjust my damage to the appropriate level then I'll do far too much damage to low level mobs and in the process waste huge amounts of Mana.
Annoyingly, classes based on Energy or Rage will not be affected by this. The fast, permanent generation of the power never made using lower ranks appealing. We Mana users however have a limited pool.
I wonder how useful it is to comment on the downranking change with current encounters and tactics in mind. Perhaps it would be better to look at this change in conjunction with the new talents and skills that healers are receiving in WotLK. How many different tools do priests, and in a raid environment the entire healing team, have to keep the tank and raid alive? Is it skillful to use Greater Heal over and over again (and even if using different ranks, technically they're still all Greater Heal casts)?
I contend that the change doesn't dumb down healing to simply cast-cancelling large heals, but instead diversifies the healer's spellset by giving an incentive to use different heals for different situations.
I contend that the change doesn't dumb down healing to simply cast-cancelling large heals,
If I had to pick between the two completely out of context, I'd say someone that can cast-cancel well is probably a better player than someone that simply repeatedly casts a highly efficient, low rank spell regardless of the OH. The former actually requires some level of coordination and awareness. The latter can be done while watching TV.
I think these changes will also favor taking a variety of healers over stacking a couple classes, but that's just a gut feeling at this point.
If I had to pick between the two completely out of context, I'd say someone that can cast-cancel well is probably a better player than someone that simply repeatedly casts a highly efficient, low rank spell regardless of the OH. The former actually requires some level of coordination and awareness. The latter can be done while watching TV.
I think these changes will also favor taking a variety of healers over stacking a couple classes, but that's just a gut feeling at this point.
Th thing is, we're not just talking about spamhealing here, but also about choosing the correctly sized heal for the task. and that requires more awareness and effort than stopcast healing.
There's going to be a huge amount of input from people who don't play healers in raids thinking this is a great idea. But essentially, it's a huge skill nerf: there's no skill involved in bombing big heals. There is skill involved in actively changing spell ranks for different amounts of healing. I was really looking forward to interacting with IHC and different ranks of GH.
Nid we just had a quick discussion about this on our guild forums and as you said... this is a nerf to our skill. How many of you have multiple ranks of spells? I'm willing to bet, a lot if not most of you. I personally use Gheal 1/3/Max, Flash 6/Max, CoH 1/Max, and now it just seems fruitless.
Those of you beta testing, what do you do if someone takes single time, 2000 damage? Are we going to be expected to cast a max rank greater heal and then just accept the 50%+ overheal so we can get mana back via serendipity? Perhaps this is opening the way for paladins to return to raid healing with flash of light to patch up the small damage, I just don't know. Though, as some of you have said I am happy to have freed up some keybindings!
Also, what would a disc priest do if someone is missing 2000 health?
Th thing is, we're not just talking about spamhealing here, but also about choosing the correctly sized heal for the task. and that requires more awareness and effort than stopcast healing.
Not going to disagree with that nor was I with my last comment. I was stating that cancel-casting isn't dumbing the game down, in some cases its smartening it up.
Also, what would a disc priest do if someone is missing 2000 health?
Isn't that what renew and lifebloom and chain heal bounces are for? Getting the minor, non repeating, nicks and scratches in the raid.
Also, what would a disc priest do if someone is missing 2000 health?
Shield the target and let renew tick if it's a low HPS fight, or shield and penance if the shield won't last for the duration. There are a lot more tools than lower ranks of greater heal.
And, this would be the solution if it were a solo disc healer. In a 10- or 25-, you would have other specced healers with their own tools for low damage to help out.
08/14/08, 6:10 AM
(what, he's too busy to click ? damn.)
